Transcription
Hi, I'm Dr. Molly Gabrien, and you are watching part three in this series on intentional focus. So, if you haven't watched the other two parts, definitely go watch them. Um, most of my videos, I think you can probably drop into any part and kind of know what's going on. This one, I think you need to watch the first two to really understand what we're talking about.
Um, okay, so when we left part two, um, I was saying that if you're a teacher, this is making you go, "Oh my gosh, how am I ever gonna teach? I can't talk about body parts. I'm gonna mess up my students if I do that. Ah, what do I do? Like, isn't this gonna make them have really bad technique if I can't tell them what to do with my their bodies?" So, this is a concern, and it's a concern of people that do this research. And so, what do they do? They test it.
Um, so the first study that we're going to look at was looking specifically at form, at technique. And this was done with volleyball players. These were novice and expert volleyball players, and they were interested in assessing not only their accuracy on this volleyball skill they were working on, but also their form, because if you're accurate, but your technique sucks, like, that's not very good, right? Um, so I want us to take a very careful look at the instructions and the feedback they gave the volleyball players, because I think this will give teachers some peace of mind.
So, in terms of the instructions they gave them on how to do this thing, especially for the novices, the expert volleyball players already knew what they were doing. The novices, they didn't really know. They did give them instructions that had to do with their bodies. So, like, "Make sure the left front foot is in front of the right foot," for instance. The critical difference was the feedback they gave them after each attempt. So, they would perform this skill, and then they'd give them certain feedback based on how they did. So, let's look at examples of their feedback.
So, in the internal focus feedback, they would say things like, "Toss the ball high enough in front of the hitting arm." So, things having to do with your body. "Snap your wrist while hitting the ball to produce a forward rotation of the ball." So, you can see looking at this list, in the internal focus list, everything is very specific to what their body parts are doing.
Now, look at the external focus feedback. "Toss the ball straight up." So, the focus is on the movement of the ball. "Imagine holding a bowl in your hand and cupping the ball with it to produce a forward rotation of the ball." So, again, the hands are in there, right? Imagine holding a ball with your hand, but it's an analogy, right? Imagine holding a a bowl. And then it says what to do with the ball, not to do what to do with the body. "Shortly before hitting the ball, shift your weight towards the target." So, again, that is telling somebody what to do with their body, but it's making the focus on going towards the target, not shift your weight to the front foot, but shift your weight towards the target. And then the last one, "Hit the ball as if using a whip, like a horseman driving horses." So, that's another analogy on how people should be moving their bodies.
So, when I was learning about this research, I was kind of having a crisis as a teacher, like, "Ah, can I ever talk about body parts again?" But this kind of gives me peace of mind, because the internal, sorry, the external focus feedback, it's not avoiding body parts altogether. It's making analogies and it's focusing on the effect of what the body is doing, rather than saying, "With your elbow, do this. With your wrist, do this," whatever.
So, what did they find? Both in terms of accuracy and in terms of form. Short story: the external focus groups did better in both accuracy and form. Let's look at the graphs from the study. They're a little complicated to look at, so I'm going to walk us through what they mean.
So, this graph here is showing accuracy z-scores. So, the filled shapes are showing the external focus group. The squares are the experts, the circles are the novices. So, you can see both square groups are doing better than both circle groups. Makes sense. We hope that the experts will be doing better than the novices. But in each group, the experts and the novices, the filled shapes are doing the best. And again, the filled shapes are the external focus group. So, that's accuracy. External focus promotes better accuracy, not surprising, given all the other research we've already talked about.
All right, now this graph is showing their scores on form, and these were determined by expert raters. So, again, the filled shapes are the external focus, the squares are the experts, the circles are the novices. All the squares are better than all the circles, we would hope, so that experts are better than novices. The interesting thing here is in the experts, the filled squares are doing better, at least by a little bit, all the way through this. So, that's the external focus produces better form.
If you look at the novices, it's super interesting. The filled circles are doing better on days one and two. But then on day three, that's the testing situation, and in the testing situation, they didn't give them any feedback. They just had them perform this skill. And suddenly, in that condition, the internal focus group catches up to the external focus group, and there isn't really much or any difference between them anymore.
So, what's going on there? That seems weird. In the study, their hypothesis was that the internal feedback they were getting was getting in their way of performing the skill. Having to constantly focus on what their body was doing was getting in the way of them doing the skill well. Once that distracting, unhelpful feedback was removed in the testing situation, then they could actually perform better, which is why the internal focus group caught up to the external focus group. That's their explanation.
Let's look at another study that assesses form, because, like I've said before, replication, right? We need to be able to replicate our results. So, in golf, apparently the X-factor is a thing. I know absolutely nothing about golf. I had never heard about this before I read this study, but there are about a million tips and tricks videos on YouTube to improve your X-factor in golf. So, here's a short video I found that illustrates what this is. So, I'll just be quiet while he narrates.
Okay, so Sean Webb here again, 3D Golf Pro. And today we're going to talk about something I get a lot of questions about during lessons and a lot of questions through email is X-factor. What is it? And people think it's a lot of different things and they have ideas about, uh, what they're trying to do with X-factor. And a lot of times it's, it's hurting their swing. So, let's talk about what it is. Basically, it's just the difference between upper body and lower body rotation. These two lines here on gears are representative of basically shoulder rotation and hip rotation in layman's terms. So, so this is a thing, apparently. It's hard to do it well.
Um, so this study took low-skilled golfers, and they were looking at what's called their X-factor stretch, which, as far as I understand it, is like when they go back like this, like how much they're like turning and stretching their body. Um, and they were measuring that as as a measure of their form, how good their form was. So, as always, there was an internal focus group and an external focus group.
So, the internal focus group was, uh, told to focus on "shifting the weight to your left foot as you hit the ball." The external focus group was told to "shift the weight to the left side of the ground as you hit the ball." So, this graph here is showing how far they were able to hit the ball. So, not surprisingly, the external focus group hit the ball further.
But what about form? What about this mysterious X-factor thing? Same thing. The external focus group is like a bazillion times better in this graph. So, higher is better in this graph. You can see it's like no contest. The external focus is way better in terms of their form. So, not only how far could they hit the ball, but how good was their form? External focus is better in both cases.
Hopefully, I've convinced you that adopting an external focus is going to help, is going to be better at helping you play the way you want to. So, some takeaways for teachers. First thing, try not to talk about body parts with students. Try to focus their attention on the effects of their motions or on the instrument itself, and not what their body parts are doing.
If you do have to talk about body parts, because we all have to talk about body parts, how are you going to teach a beginner how to hold their bow if you don't talk about putting the pinky on the top, if you're, if you're a violin or viola teacher? As much as possible, try to use analogies. That seems to be something that comes up over and over again, and kind of a side note in a lot of this, a lot of these studies, is that analogies are just as effective as a true external focus. So, adopt analogies as much as you possibly can.
When you are giving feedback to your students, they play something for you, something's not right with their technique. Try as much as possible to craft your feedback to focus their attention outside their bodies. Um, and then with this proximal and distal focus thing, the more advanced your student, the more you want them to adopt an external focus that is further away from their body. The more beginner a student is, you want the external focus to be closer to their bodies. And this is likely going to be something that you're going to have to experiment with to figure out what works for that particular level of student and what works for that particular student, right? We all know that everybody's different, everybody learns differently, every student is different. So, experiment with your language, experiment with what works the best for students.
I, for any given skill, I have tried over the years to come up with a variety of different analogies and metaphors to describe what something feels like so that students can understand, but they're not thinking about my, "Oh, my elbow does this," or "my wrist does this." And I often use a vari, all of them with students. So, I will say, "Okay, let's try this. Think of, you know." So, with producing a good sound, I talk a lot about, um, that the feeling of the hair on the string should feel like when you paint on the wall with a paintbrush that's full of paint, and that, like, goopy feeling that's really, really nice and satisfying. That's what the hair should feel like, rather than like an old, dried-out paintbrush that doesn't work very well. And that analogy works great for a lot of students, but not every single student.
And so sometimes I will tell students to imagine that they are following the camber of the bow. So, that's the slight curve that's in bows. They're drawing the same curve as the camber, and that helps other students in, in a way that the paintbrush thing doesn't really help them. I have other analogies, but I think you get the idea. So, experiment with your students, experiment with what language works the best for them, close to their bodies, far from their bodies. But as much as possible, limit how much you're talking about actual body parts.
So, some advice for players. Those of you that are are professionals or out in the world or teaching yourself or all those hours in between your lessons when your teacher isn't there to give you feedback. Same thing. Try not to think about what your specific body parts are doing in terms of, "Oh, my elbow has to do this," or "my wrist has to do this," or "my lips have to do this." Think instead about the effect you are trying to produce. So, the sound you're trying to produce, or the, the shape and trajectory, trajectory of the phrase, what you're trying to express. So, think of things outside your body. Again, use analogies with yourself. Whenever I am working on something, be it technical or musical, I am always trying to come up with analogies for what does this feel like? What does this sound like? So that I have something to hold on to, often something to maybe write in my music, but is not directed at a specific body part. Um, and so think really creatively in this way for yourself to help yourself gain more control and more expressivity in your playing.
Again, like I was saying in the advice to teachers, experiment with a proximal versus distal focus. If you are a professional musician, likely a distal focus is going to be the best for you, kind of across the board, far from your body. If you are more in the initial stages of learning, probably a focus closer to your body is going to work better for you. But again, experiment. And, you know, if you're a professional, but you are learning some new extended techniques, say, or you are retooling your technique and so you're going backwards by many, many steps so that you can build forwards, you may need to adopt a proximal focus for that skill for a while while you work out the kinks in whatever it is. And then as you get more experienced with it, then you can adapt a more, a more distal focus. So, again, experiment.
I should add that when you are trying to self-assess whether a distal or proximal focus works better for you, you should do that by recording and making your assessment based on what you hear in the recording. So, in that study I discussed with the voice majors who had to either, like, sing to the back of the hall, for instance, versus something closer to their bodies, their own self-assessment in the moment of what was best was not actually always the best based on listeners' feedback. And those listeners were, like, professional singers, like they knew what they were listening to. Um, and so that suggests that sometimes our experience in the moment of performing with a distal or proximal focus is not necessarily the most accurate. So, always, yes, pay attention to what you feel in the moment, but always record and listen back to make your final assessment.
One last thing to leave you with. This is sort of a bonus. Not only does adopting an external focus mean that we learn and perform the skill better, but it also protects us against choking. Um, I talk about choking a little bit in my video series on memorization. I'll put that in the, in the, in the comment section, so you can look that up if you want. But, um, choking basically is not performing up to our potential in a, in a performance situation, despite the fact that we're well-prepared and we have the ability to do it. So, if you haven't practiced and you're not prepared and you don't play well, that's not choking. If you are trying to perform something that is way too hard for you and you don't have the skill for that and you don't play well, that's also not choking. Um, so choking is, you're prepared, you have the skill, and yet something happens. It's happened to every single one of us, right? And we're, we all want to know, how do I stop that from happening? These random mistakes that never happen, or that feeling when you get on stage that suddenly you don't know how to play your instrument, or your fingers are like, totally not working.
Um, they have found that adopting an external focus protects against choking because one of the main causes of choking, they have found, is focusing too much on specifically what your body is supposed to be doing and micromanaging the movements of your body. That's exactly what an ex, an internal focus promotes. So, adopting an external focus will not only help you learn the skill better, but it will help you perform the skill better. So, there's no reason not to do this. It's a win-win-win in every possible situation. Um, so have fun experimenting with this. This may be a really different way of thinking for some of you. It may be, some of you may say, "Well, duh, I knew that." Great. Good. Share it with everybody. You know, um, if you have really great analogies or really great ways of explaining things to yourself or students or whatever, please put them in the comments so other people can see them so we can all learn from each other. Um, and as always, thanks so much for watching.